The Object and the Cause in the "Vulgate Cycle"

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"The thirteenth-century French Vulgate Cycle is the earliest vernacular text to trace the Arthurian world from the beginning of the Holy Grail at Christ's crucifixion to the death of the kingdom and its king. In this study, one of the first to treat the Cycle's five texts as a unified work, Miranda Griffin explores notions of chronology and causality within the Cycle, as the text seeks to explain the origins of Arthurian characters, objects and motifs. Informed by psychoanalytic theory, her reading focuses especially on the construction within the Cycle of three privileged objects of desire-the book, the body and the Grail-which, Griffin argues, function as focal points for the anxieties concerning origins voiced by the Cycle's characters and critics. This original approach opens up new avenues of research which go directly to the heart of many concerns about this important text."

Miranda Griffin is Fellow in French at Girton College, University of Cambridge.